Monday, November 21, 2016

"In competition" means these films were selected by the screeners to be eligible for awards at the festival. "Features" are 'stories' that are 55 to 140 minutes. "Shorts" are stories that are 10-55 minutes. Super shorts are stories under 10 minutes. 'Stories' are fictional and distinguished from documentaries. This looks like a particularly strong group this year. Danny DeVito is in one, Ed Asner in another, Valerie Harper in yet another. Bruce Springsteen played a role in getting one to screen (because of issues over music rights.) Here's the list and below is a bit more about each.

Shorts in Competition

Director

Country

Length

Curmudgeons

Jake DeVito

USA

17 min

Gorilla

Tibo Pinsard

France

14 min

Il Campione (The Champion )

Boming Jiang

Italy

12 min

Like A Butterfly

Eitan Pitigliani

United States

28 min

My Mom and the Girl

Susie Singer Carter

United States

20 min

Thunder Road

Jim Cummings

USA

13 min

Since shorts are short, they are grouped into programs. These are the programs that the films are in and when those programs show: Hard Knocks, Love and Pain, and Global Village. The Martini Matinee is a regular AIFF event and takes a few shorts from different programs. Also, there are some super shorts mixed in some of the programs.

This chart is my attempt to help you find which program each of the shorts in competition is in and when you can see them. I'd note that those shorts not in competition can also be really good. I often find films at the festival that are not in competition that I think should have been. But seeing the ones in competition is a good bet. And the others are mixed into the programs.

"THE INSPIRATION. I love apes. Not you? I love real monkeys, but also "fake" apes, like the old King Kong, those played by actors in the original The Planet of the Apes, or the wonderfully created apes by makeup master artist Rick Baker for Greystoke, with Christopher Lambert and Ian Holm. All these films and these movie apes have profoundly marked my viewer's imagination, the universe they live in, the dangerous and fascinating jungle, but mainly because it talks to my "inner ape". We do not think enough about our "inner ape". Do we ?"

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Il Campione (The Champion )
Boming Jiang
Italy
0:12:00
✓
I'm having trouble finding much about this film, so I'll just leave you with the trailer for now.

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Like A Butterfly

Eitan Pitigliani

USA

0:28:00

"About a man who dreams he's a butterfly and he becomes so involved in this dream that he no longer knows if he's a man dreaming he's a butterfly, or if he's a butterfly dreaming he's a man."

"the reason why I became a director, which is the need to capture the essence of life ­ and of what life could be ­ and then put it on screen, through a special medium: the film. What is great about films is that you make them together with other people, in my case with wonderful and special individuals that helped me take the idea I first had to the final stage. The story of the film came from a series of personal experiences that I have had over time, that I then jotted down in words together with the screenwriter Alessandro Regaldo. There were so many things that inspired me while I was writing the story."

"MY MOM AND THE GIRL is a true story based on an odd encounter my East Coast mother, who suffers with Alzheimer's, shared one evening on the streets of East L.A. The story takes off after dinner with family & friends takes a dark turn and my mother is led to a proverbial crossroads where 3 very disparate, desperate women are unpredictably pulled back into the light. It's a funny, poignant and surprisingly rich story where apparent disabilities can be seen as gifts."

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Thunder Road
Jim Cummings
USA
0:13:00
✓

"As Cummings tells it, the film very unexpectedly got into Sundance, where it then won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Short Film. Of course, this brought some heat to the short and Cummings, which meant attention was also paid to a major question from the film: If he’d secured the rights to Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road,” which plays during a pivotal scene. After paying $7,000 for the rights to the song so it could travel the festival circuit, Cummings was faced with a $40,000 to 50,000 licensing fee to put his short online. This prompted Cummings to take his case to Springsteen in the form of an open letter he posted on the internet."

*When I first starting blogging the film festival, films that were available online were not eligible for most festivals and there was some concern when I would find the whole film somewhere. But online video has gone from the dark ages to the present in just a few years. If a film is good, you should want to see it several times, and on the big screen as well as on your computer.

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I started this blog just to find out what the blogworld was all about. I figured I needed to actually blog, not just read other people's blogs, to understand how it works, and what ways it could be used. This is all experimental. A learning exercise for me. It's turning out to be a look at one person's (mine) life based in Anchorage. With occasional trips away.
UPDATE July 6, 2015: Here's a post that discusses my evasiveness in this profile - it's intentional.